Upselling and cross-selling is a legitimate strategy that can help you grow your revenue. In terms of numbers, it’s also more beneficial than prospecting new customers. In fact, it costs 5-20 more to obtain a new customer than to keep the current one.

Besides, upselling and cross-selling can help you differentiate your business from the competition. However, you can’t just go and adopt it as a brand new strategy. You need to build a healthy foundation to be able to enhance your upselling and cross-selling capabilities.

In this short guide, you’ll learn what you need to do before you can make relevant upselling and cross-selling offers for your customers.

 

Set The Tone Before Customers Enter Your Store

Did you ever hear the expression “buying mood”? To upsell or cross-sell your products, you need to ease your shoppers into a buying mood. The term describes a customer willing to purchase some of the products in your offer. To do it, you need to set the tone before customers enter your store.

How do you do it? Various factors come into play here, ranging from a memorable business name to fine-tuning your store look and feel.

For example, a study establishes the link between music currently being played in a store and the customers’ buying mood. It found that familiar popular music has a negative effect while unfamiliar pleasant music has a positive impact on shopping. Store owners can also catch the customer’s eye with the smart use of colors.

Setting the tone before the customer enters the store is also possible through marketing messages. It will be worth your while to explore and test different marketing messages to find the one that resonates the best with your customers.

 

Make Customers Feel Welcome

Making customers feel welcome is an integral part of the customer experience. It will help them remember your store and associate your brand with positive feelings. Don’t forget that customers are human beings, and they are hardwired to react to your staff as soon as they enter the store.

Fortunately, there are plenty of strategies that don’t require a budget to do it. Let’s start with a smile. A smile awaiting the customer that has just entered a store goes a long way. It immediately sets the mood and makes customers feel welcome.

A smile is only one part of the first impression, and first impressions are critical to establishing a meaningful connection with a customer. To enhance it, the staff should abide by a specific dressing code. Having employees who look professional and greet and acknowledge customers with smiles on their faces is a recipe for success.

 

Customer Service is the Focal Point

 

Once you set a tone and make sure your staff follows through with your “make every customer feel welcome” strategy, the time has come to address the customer service. Why? Because customer service is one of the customer experience pillars. In fact, over 70% of customers remain loyal to brands because of the great customer service.

A smile, dressing code, and a warm greeting already establish the base for it. How do you proceed? That calls for staff training in specific areas such as active listening, people skills, soft skills, and positive and reaffirming language.

One of the ways to approach this challenge is to create a customer service script. The script should outline the best word choices for every possible situation your team can brainstorm. When a staff member finds themselves in an unfamiliar situation, they can easily fall back on the script and react accordingly.

Consider making your customer service training an ongoing strategy. The customer behavior, needs, wants, and expectations are not carved in a stone. They change, and so do the best customer service practices.

 

Make an Effort to Connect With Your Customers

To capitalize on your upselling and cross-selling offers, you need to leverage a relationship with your customers. To build a relationship, you first need to connect with your customers. Here are some best practices to help you do it.

Personalization

In a customer-centric era, personalization goes without question, especially after learning that it has a significant impact on buying behavior. It’s hard to imagine a store without a computer nowadays. Investing in an affordable CRM solution can help you store your customers’ most important information, including personal information, a past purchase, interaction, and complaints.

You can leverage this data to custom-tailor your offer to your customers’ personal needs. There’s no better way to connect with your customers than to show them you care and value them for choosing your company.

Be genuine and helpful

Break the corporate mold to appear genuine to your customers. People can’t relate to your staff if they remain within the boundaries of business talk. Now would be a great time to revisit your brand image, tone, and voice and find a way for every staff member to reflect it through customer interactions.

While reflecting the company values, every staff member should bring something genuine and personal into the communication with a customer. Being genuine can help connect with another human being. Appearing understanding and helpful builds trust and enables long-term connection.

Appreciate customers

Appreciating customers is a strategy that goes way back to the days of the first trade. Today, you can appreciate the customers in way more ways than before. For instance, you can give personalized appreciation messages with every purchase, film and publish an appreciation video, or even gift something meaningful to your customers.

Answer all questions

Finally, you should be ready to answer all your customers’ questions. You can build a central repository of knowledge and enable your staff to contribute to it. Encourage your employees to apologize if they don’t have all the answers and return to the customer once they have them. Answering questions is great because it establishes your brand as knowledgeable, trustworthy, and authoritative.

 

You’re Ready to Upsell and Cross-Sell

 

If you cross the boxes in front of all the above-listed tips, you are ready to upsell and cross-sell. You have done everything in your power to optimize your store look and feel for the best customer experience. You have improved customer service and enabled your staff to build long-lasting and meaningful relationships with your customers.

More importantly, thanks to your efforts to personalize the customer experience, you can now offer relevant upsell and cross-sell offers to your customers individually.

Conclusion

While upselling and cross-selling can create additional revenue streams, it takes time to build a starting ground for it to work. This short guide will put you on the right track to succeed even if you run a small retail business. Feel free to expand your research as there are many actionable tips that can help you improve your upselling and cross-selling efforts.

 

 

 

Ogi Djuraskovic is the founder of FirstSiteGuide.com. On his website, he is trying to help people build a successful online business with the right mix of skills. Besides his online tutoring, he really enjoys offline activities, such as mount biking and walking his frenchie Jumbo.